Peel and boil potatoes in salted water until soft; drain, and mash smooth. Take a pint of the mashed potatoes; mix with 2 tablespoonfuls of melted butter and 1 egg; add a little flour, and form into balls. Put them into a well-buttered baking-pan; sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese and bake in a quick oven to a golden brown. Serve with stewed chicken.
A short recipe with a few gaps a modern cook has to fill: the flour is unmeasured, the oven is given only as "quick," and there is no yield. None of it is difficult, but the potato has to be handled correctly or the balls slump.
- The hinge: dry, floury potatoesUse a starchy variety (russet or a floury white) and let the drained potatoes steam dry in the hot pan for a minute before mashing. Waxy or wet potatoes will absorb far more flour and the balls will spread rather than hold their shape.
- "A quick oven"Generally taken as somewhere around 400-450F. At that sort of heat the balls should take roughly 20 minutes or so to colour; watch them, as the Parmesan browns before the interiors dry out.
- A pint of mashed potatoMeasured by volume, not weight: about 2 cups if the pint is the American one (an imperial pint would be 20 fl oz), which comes from something like 1 1/4 lb of raw potatoes. That should give roughly eight to twelve balls the size of a small egg, enough for three or four as a side dish.
- "A little flour"Genuinely vague in the original. Start with 2 tablespoons for a pint of mash and add only as much more as it takes to make the mixture just handleable; every extra spoonful makes the finished balls heavier and more pasty.
- Egg and butterOne whole egg and 2 tablespoons melted butter. Mix them into the potato while it is warm but no longer steaming hot, so the egg thickens rather than scrambles.
- ParmesanGrate it yourself from a wedge. Pre-grated tubs contain anti-caking starch and brown patchily; a fine, dry grating clings to the damp surface and forms a crust.
- Shaping and panWet or floured hands stop the mixture sticking. Butter the pan generously and space the balls apart, or turn the recipe into a sheet-pan job on parchment, which releases more reliably than butter alone.
- ServingThe suggested stewed chicken is sound because the balls are dry-baked and want gravy. They are best straight from the oven; reheated, the crust softens.
This is the standard croquette mixture of the nineteenth-century European kitchen — potato, butter, egg, a binding of flour — baked rather than fried, and given an Italian name by the Parmesan and nothing else. In books of this kind, one dish a day for a year with a country attached to each, the "nation" is usually carried by a single ingredient or a sauce. Parmesan was the obvious shorthand, since hard grating cheese from Italy had been a reliable import into Britain and America for generations and kept well in a larder without refrigeration. The nearest real Italian relatives are the fried potato croquettes of the south and the gnocchi di patate of the north, both of which depend, as this does, on keeping the potato as dry as possible.